Oldest Recorded Computer Music
Included in the Ferranti Mark 1's instruction set was a hoot command, which enabled the machine to give auditory feedback to its operators. The sound generated could be altered in pitch, a feature which was exploited when the Mark 1 made the earliest known recording of computer music, playing a medley which included "God Save the King", "Baa Baa Black Sheep", and "In the Mood". The recording was made by the BBC towards the end of 1951, and the programming was done by Christopher Strachey, a maths teacher at Harrow and a friend of Alan Turing. It was not however the first computer to have played music – CSIRAC, Australia's first digital computer, achieved that with a rendition of Colonel Bogey.
Read more about this topic: Ferranti Mark 1
Famous quotes containing the words oldest, recorded, computer and/or music:
“The oldest man he seemed that ever wore grey hairs.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“The anarchy, assassination, and sacrilege by which the Kingdom of France has been disgraced, desolated, and polluted for some years past cannot but have excited the strongest emotions of horror in every virtuous Briton. But within these days our hearts have been pierced by the recital of proceedings in that country more brutal than any recorded in the annals of the world.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)
“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.”
—Robert M. Pirsig (b. 1928)
“While the music is performed, the cameras linger savagely over the faces of the audience. What a bottomless chasm of vacuity they reveal! Those who flock round the Beatles, who scream themselves into hysteria, whose vacant faces flicker over the TV screen, are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures . . .”
—Paul Johnson (b. 1928)